In Guildhall Square the fountains are creating mini-rainbows, young mums are letting their toddlers run through the spray, pensioners are basking on benches and shoppers bare-armed, bare-legged, are perspiring freely.
My attention’s drawn to a group of adolescents incongruously clad in full school uniform, looking hot and apprehensive. Of course! This is EXAM weather!
How vividly I remember it… the assembly hall a grid of single desks, widely spaced, the walls stripped of anything construed as helpful. We file in and take our places, knowing the next couple of hours will determine our future. Too late now for regrets about acting the maggot in Mr G’s lessons, or the revision plan that was more theory than practice.
The unsmiling invigilator recites a list of sanctions, concluding with the doom-laden dictum: “You may turn over your papers.”
Who can describe the mental paralysis triggered by an exam paper that might as well be written in Sanskrit?
The sun beats in through the long windows. Outside, a gaudy blaze of azalea and rhododendron; inside, nothing but the tick of the unforgiving clock, the frantic buzz of a bluebottle looking for an exit and rows of bowed heads, scribbling and scribbling. Whether it’s the industrial development of the Ruhr basin, the Repeal of the Corn Laws or the critical appraisal of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I’m in deep trouble.
Release brings little relief. We gather outside, the swotty ones looking smug, the rest of us sweaty, trembling and lying in our teeth. There’s another paper in the afternoon – and the distant and unwelcome prospect of the fateful envelope that will arrive in August.
That was long ago in the days when there were no second chances and fewer alternatives. In the light of today’s pampered examinees, I wonder how we managed to qualify for anything without ‘revision recipes’ that recommend “frequent study breaks (play a computer game, text or phone a friend,) healthy snacks, vitamin supplements, favourite music, relaxing baths and no hassle from parents.” No wonder our students have the attention-span of fruit fly. There’s only one way to learn anything and that’s in concentrated silence with no distractions.
Testing is the new tyranny in education. We’re constantly calibrating children from nursery upwards against scales implemented at the behest of theorists and every new education minister astride a favourite hobby horse begins by fiddling with the curriculum.
My heart goes out to the numberless motivational, inspiring and committed career teachers, straitjacketed by a system that’s become laborious and prescriptive, where aims, objectives and outcomes must be recorded and fulfill the demands of the inspectorate that lessons must be ‘fun’.
Since when did education become part of the entertainment industry? The vital grasp of basics is a tough, repetitive, but necessary slog – and the solid foundation upon which all subsequent success depends. Nothing incenses me more than the aimless graduate who airily declares: “I might give teaching a go for a year or two – to see if I like it”. God be with the days when teaching was regarded as a vocation, not a mere job and teachers were trusted.
Sadly, we’re educating our children for export because of our lamentable political vacuum. A poll taken in the northwest revealed that 87 per cent of young people questioned see no future for themselves here. Of 45 recent Derry graduates from universities across the water, precisely ONE came home to work. We can’t afford this haemorrhage of our brightest and best. At the other end of the scale, despite huge investment in remedial measures, we have a growing number of disengaged low-achievers who drift through the system barely literate. I’ve depressed myself now…
I see the latest gimmick for soothing exam nerves is to sniff a sprig of rosemary herb. ‘Rosemary for remembrance,’ as Shakespeare put it. Take it from me, if you didn’t bother to revise it, you won’t remember it. But take heart exam candidates, you’re living in an era of ‘lifelong learning’ with a multiplicity of options we never had.
Besides, when you get to be my age, nobody will ever ask how you did in your ‘O’ or ‘A’ levels.
